A Brief (ie. Long and Drawn Out), Vaguely Racist Transcription of Chinese Food Philosophy

While attending college, I have had the good fortune to be surrounded by delicious Asian cuisine. This is due to the location of my campus: in the heart of the Asian District, completely surrounded by... ASIANS! And it seems like each and every one of them owns their own cheap, hole-in-the-wall restaurant where you can get enough beef fried rice to feed you and all your pets and loved ones for under $4. It's like being in heaven, if instead of a mansion, you got amazing Chinese food.
Anyways, these restaurants always spark my fancy, not only for the scrumptious food, but also for the interesting atmosphere. My favorite Chinese place is called “China House,” and the best thing about it is how much it looks like an old Dairy Queen, with those bright orange, rock hard booths you can only get from the 60's. The silverware is plastic and is located at your table in a large plastic cup (which you may find is also the same cup that Egg Drop Soup comes in). There is so much soy sauce in the room, your kidneys almost roll over and quit as you walk in the door.
The guys behind the counter seemed like pretty friendly guys, one not too much older than me, the other not too much older than him. They helped me get my beef fried rice and Sprite in less than 2 minutes, then I sat alone at one of the booths and ate in silence while they started talking. Here's where my imagination got on a train and left town for a while because they were speaking another language. Possibly Cantonese, Vietnamese, or Chinese, but it really could have been any of the -ese's from that region of the world and I would never know the difference.
Most people in the Midwest don't really like when people speak other languages around them. The sentiment is generally echoed throughout Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas that if you moved to America, “you should learn to speak GOD DAMNED ENGLISH!!!” I completely disagree with this sentiment. After watching countless foreign films and operas, I found that one could generally tell what was being said given three things: context, tone, and facial expression. Sometimes in foreign things, some of these elements are dropped in an effort, as far as I can tell, to make the common American feel like an idiot, which I don't mind. For instance, there's no context in French Surrealism. There's not really anyway to tell tone in the midst of an aria, and sometimes they make happy lyrics go with minor keys to get a reaction, so there's no help there.
Returning to my point, the two guys were speaking in their language which was far from my own. I decided to try to figure out what they were talking about, but I was lacking two of the three necessities: context and facial expression (I was staring at my food to avoid getting caught staring at them). As a result, I was able to supply my own context, and thus my own conversation.
I imagined that they were probably discussing the finer points of moral philosophy or Einstein's Theory of Time-Space, or with the best of luck, they were doing both simultaneously.
“In present times,” one would say, “we can't think of things as black and white, we have to view them as differing shades of gray. Otherwise, we become no better than the Nazis. This is why there's such a fine line between Religious Fundamentalism and Racism. They think that it is their job to tell the difference between the black and the white and that they have to eradicate the black to make way for the white. It's a self-destructive system, but as long as there is 'evil' in the world, they will believe that it is possible to eradicate it, not considering the idea that morality is relative and that what is right depends on the time and place.”
“I just can't agree with relative morality,” the other would retort. “If that's true, then there really is no morality. The gray area is not defined enough to tell whether anything is really right or wrong. For instance, let's say a guy robs from another guy. The robbee would, in turn, kill the robber, as is written in the law. But the robber was only stealing to help his family, in fact, he gave everything he stole to his mother. Is it then necessary for the robbee to kill the robber's mother because she's an accomplice?”
“You make a valid, if irrelevant point. We have no need to dispute intuitive wrongs,” he would say matter of factly as he removed the sweet and sour chicken from the hot oil.
“Intuitive wrongs?”
“Yes, things which one knows instinctively is wrong-”
“You're contradicting yourself. If a person knows instinctively that something is wrong, that means that there is a definite wrong and a definite right, there is no gray.”
“Instinctive contextually.”
“Contextually instinctive?” The debate was getting heated.
“Yes, given a certain set of circumstance, people instinctively know that one choice is right and another wrong. You can see this every day. Let's say you're walking down the street and you bump into a guy, then he turns and shoots you. Contextually, is that morally right? No, obviously not. Now you're walking down the street and you happen to bump into a guy whose mother you just killed, then he turns and shoots you. Contextually right? Yes, I would say so.”
“So to you, morality is on a sort of continuum?” He indicated what he meant by rubbing the side of the Coke machine to demonstrate its smoothness (no lie). “Just a smooth plane that we float from one side to the other? And over here,” he felt up high, “morality is completely different, sometimes opposite of what it is over here?” he felt down low.
“Yeah kind of like that, like how when approaching the speed of light, physical measurements change and even time slows down. It all depends on how you look at it.”
“You are not even going to tell me you believe all of Einstein's crap!” One does not normally go into a Chinese restaurant expecting to hear statements like this.
“Einstein's crap?!”
“Yeah,” he would say as he stirred the Egg Drop Soup, “Einstein was like Popular Science for Idiots. Going faster changes physical measurements, my ass! That's a load of crap! Haven't you heard of Schroedinger's Cat?”
“Yeah, and the problem with Schroedinger's Cat?”
“What?”
“It doesn't prove anything! It's like someone trying to prove that God exists using the logical fallacy, 'prove he doesn't.' It's just stupid.”
“But the point is that it doesn't prove anything, thus knocking a hole in Einstein's theory, even though the pop science junkies couldn't see it...”
At this point, another customer walked in, a moderate sized black woman, but she had feet the size of watermelons crammed into her size 10 shoes. I stared at her feet wondering, “how do you gain weight in just your feet? What kind of foods do that?” I soon realized that I couldn't stop staring; that if she stood there forever, I would stare forever wondering about her gargantuan feet. Instead, she got her box of Chinese that the guys had been making during their conversation and left, and my ears perked up to hear the continuation of the discussion which I was attributing to these guys, which I was adding in at the bottom of the screen like English subtitles to their whatever language, but the younger guy just came over and sat down at a booth across from me.
He said one more thing to the older. I assumed it was him getting his final word in. Something like, “If Einstein was indeed correct in his Theory of Relativity, then I could understand morality being relative, because everything would be relative. However, I don't believe he was correct because I can't make myself believe that time and space and morality and mortality and everything are like some tremendous Fruit-By-The-Foot that stretches and bends and contracts and rips and has funny shapes that don't make any sense. To me that is living in a fantasy world in which everything can be described in variable terms, and the only reason I am able to sit in this booth is because at this moment the booth is deciding to occupy the space beneath me and only that space, when it really could be occupying any space or time. And I can't believe that.”
“There's just no convincing you,” the other would say as he went about his restaurant duties.
Here, I finished my rice and got another soda. “80 cents,” the younger one said, so I gave him a dollar and left him the 20 cents. It was the least I could give for the night's entertainment.
This is the conversation I transcribed for them, and I really wanted to believe that it was true. That in this tiny, runt of the mill Chinese place with burger-joint booths, these somewhat greasy young men were waxing philosophic in a language I couldn't understand. Not like I can't understand Kierkegaard or Hegel, but literally couldn't understand. There was something hidden and exotic about the whole idea, but in all likelihood, they were probably talking about women with ridiculously large feet. Just like I was. I don't know. I can only guess.